Interview with Reverend George Scriven

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[abridged]
INTRODUCTION TO TAPE - Roenna Fahrney, Harford County Library
This is the first of a series of talks on the history of Darlington to be given by the Reverend Scriven in Darlington, January 1975.
INTRODUCTION TO REVEREND SCRIVEN
your attention first . . . the Recreation Council, we welcome you to this series of programs on the history of Darlington.
Reverend Mr. George B. Scriven was for many years the pastor of Nativity Episcopal Church, retiring from that post in 1972. He became a resident of Darlington in 1940 when he married Miss Isabel Wilson, and has maintained a summer home here ever since.
Until recently he was an editor of religious textbooks, but in recent years has concentrated on the history of Maryland and the local history of the Darlington community. Articles which he has written have appeared in the Baltimore Sun, the Maryland Historical Magazine, and Church Historical Magazine, and the Johns Hopkins Journal of the History of Medicine. This month he has an article appearing in the Old Mill News on the first mills in Maryland.
In making the introduction, I should remind you that on the twenty-first of January, this room will not be available to us because of the regular meeting of the PTA of the school and that session will be moved and held in the parish house of the Grace Episcopal Church.
I present to you the Reverend Mr. George B. Scriven.
5: The first thing I have to do is thank the Community Council for giving me the opportunity to do something that I would really like to do anyway. So they just had to give me a chance, and I'm here.
I'm very much interested in the local history of this area, and about twenty-five years ago started gathering information on the settlement of the original Baltimore County. That, as you know,
5: was the area on both sides of the bay. On the eastern shore, the county line went from Toichester into Chestertown. On this side of the bay, the county line was Mountain Road going down to Gibson Island. And apart from those two boundaries, nobody knew where any other boundaries of the county were. They were lost somewhere in what's now Delaware or Pennsylvania or
Western Maryland. Nobody knew where it was.
When people made estimates of the Indians of Maryland in the seventeenth century, much the same thing happened. Nobody knew how much country Maryland covered and nobody had been to all the Indian places anyway, so it's rather hard to tell. One man's guess was about as good as another.
In talking about this, I would like to start with a rather broad area and finally get down to the very narrow one of the village of Darlington itself.
So, beginning far enough back, we discover that there were Indians here as they were everywhere else in the United States and South America, also, and Canada, a great many years ago. It has only been since carbon dating has been possible that people have begun to get even approximate dates for such things. And it is estimated that Indians came to this country - that is, the United States, to Canada and to South America - at least as early as the Wisconsin Glacial Period about thirty-five thousand years ago - thirty-five or forty thousand - five thousand years isn't important when you get that far back. And they came somewhere from the outer part of Siberia. They crossed the ice into what is now Alaska and worked their way down the valleys of the coastal area and finally went all over this country and all over South America.
Now, it's very difficult - if you'll let me get away from the mike for just a minute - to appreciate time. If you let the distance of that board cover the whole thirty-five thousand years that there were probably Indians around in this area as well as others, this little bit - from here over - begins to cover what we have a little information on.
From about here over to about twelve thousand B.C., we know that there were Indians in this country, though there's a little bit of information on them, not much. They were at that time wanderers who were not even hunters - they were just gatherers of food.
They probably bedded down at night much the same way that most wild animals do, finding as warm a place as possible. They had no
5: tools of any sort; the closest they could get to it was to pick up pieces of stone that approximated the tools that later Indians made out of stone. But beginning about here - about twelve thousand B.C. and running from there to about eight thousand I mean, twelve thousand years ago to eight thousand years ago you go back that far, there was a type of spear point found which has been found all over the northern part of the United States - over much of the southern, also, and, I think, down in Central America - I don't know how much beyond that, but certainly over all the area of the United States and up into what is much of Alaska.
It was a kind of point which you've probably never seen. There is one pictured there in the most recent issue of the Smithsonian Magazine. It was what was called a fluted point. Now they were about the size of this - this isn't one of them. And on each side, there was a groove, a very noticeable groove, right down the middle of each side of it. If you ever come across one, you'll be able to recognize it by that. And people began to distinguish them between World War I and World War II. I don't remember the exact time, but the occasion is interesting . . . a colored cowhand was riding into Folsom, New Mexico and going down a dry gulch, he came across a place where the bank had slipped down, and he saw something sticking out of the debris. He went over and took some samples out of it, found there were some peculiar-looking spear points among them. So he put them in his pocket. When he got into the local saloon that evening, he was showing them around, and one man saw them and thought "Here is something of great importance." So he called a friend of his who was an archeologist in Indian affairs. He came out and he began to work on them, and since that time, they have been called fluted points.
There are several varieties of them. They have been found on in-
surface finds in Harford County, but never in any diggings that I know of.
I speak with much hesitation on this whole subject of Indian things because the information is changing very rapidly. In any kind of archeology, a ten-year-old textbook is out of date, and in this one, I suppose a five-year-old textbook is pretty much out of date. And if you're interested in following it, you ought to join the local society, archeological society, which I think has its headquarters in Bel Air. I see one of the members in front of me, and if anybody is interested, I'm sure he would be glad to tell you about it after the meeting. Because if you want to follow the Indian affairs, that's the way to do it.
5: But those fluted points have been found in in-surface finds right here in Maryland. So many of them have been found in Pennsylvania that one Pennsylvania archeologist claimed that they started there. But the others didn't follow his lead - they think he was not accurate.
But we know almost nothing about the Indians of that period, except that they used that kind of a spear point. And just within the last year, some archeologist found out how, exactly in detail, they were fastened onto the spear., and there's an article about it in the most recent Smithsonian Magazine. So if you find a relic of that period, it will be one of those fluted points; probably will be of fairly good size; and there is a chance of finding them right in your own back yard.
The next period is one in which Indians begin to shape some stones a little bit to make them more nearly what they wanted. This rather crude-looking object here is one of them. This is a piece of soapstone. This was a part of a soapstone bowl which was broken in the process of manufacturing. You can see it was rounded - the bottom was shaped - it was rounded here. And when the maker was trying to dig a sort of a hole in it here, he split off half of it, probably much to his disgust, and he threw it down, and it's been found since. You can find many of those around these parts - many of them were made on that soapstone ridge near Scarborough - and the remains of a great many of them, incomplete remains, most of them. But that is a relic of the next period.
Then there was after that the period, which for want of a better name, they called transitional in this area - simply who were moving from one part of a culture to another. And again, about the only thing we know about it very definitely is that Indians at that point started to make some pottery - they started to. And having made soapstone bowls, they made a pottery bowl that was shaped something like it, a very crude sort of an affair. And those are characteristics of that period.
The periods about which we know most were called the Eastern Woodlands - three periods within that area. If all of this represents one of those, this little stripe over here represents about that last part. And we know more about those because they were the latest Indians in these parts or anywhere else. We know about them through archeology. The sights can now be located and can be dated fairly accurately, and there still remains a great deal to be done.
Beginning with that first woodland period, there was a beginning of some making of pottery. The Indians then came to be a little
5: more ... by that time, about 200 B.C. ... they came to be a little more like the Indians that were here when the first white people came into the area. They were beginning, by that time, to be gatherers of food . . . not only gatherers, but to cultivate a little bit of food - not much, but a little. And they began to cultivate gardens. They had corn and beans and squash, all of which were varieties that came from Mexico by way of more civilized Indians. And about that time they began to develop a bow and arrow for use; it was much more useful than a spear. And from then on we get more accurate information and more of it in the various digs that are made.
By the middle woodland period, bows and arrows were well used; that is, the early Christian centuries would be covered by that. Of course, they had no contact with any civilized part of the world, so all we know of them is through archeological remains. Finally, in the last of the Eastern Woodland cultures, the
Indians looked very much like they did when the white men got here; that is, all those in the east lived in towns - they lived in collections of houses which made up a town or village. Some¬times they were fortified by having poles placed on ends around them, making a kind of a fort. They grew gardens. By the last of that woodland period, they made canoes, both dugout and bark canoes. By the last part of that Eastern Woodland period, they were growing not only gardens, but almost fields of produce; and they weren't depending as much then as they were in the past simply on getting game for food. That's long enough to spend the few minutes we have on a group of people that really didn't leave us much except some remains that can be dug up; and if you are interested in it, you can find a lot of information available. And the best way to keep up with it is to join a local archeologi¬cal society. It helps the society to do some work and it gives you other people to work with if you want to follow up with that particular field. And there's still an enormous amount to be done.
When the white settlers got here, they found the Indians all up and down the coast and they were, in this area, of several different sorts. The Indians who dominated this area when the first white people came to the head of the bay and before that - they were there one hundred years before that - lived where Washington Borough, Pennsylvania now is; that was their main town. There was a smaller village just across the river between the mouth of Octoraro Creek and the dam, and that village lasted there until about the 16901s. It's easy to see why many settlers didn't move into this area until later, because those were a type of Iroquoian Indians. They had moved down about one hundred years before from the Iroquoian area in central New York, where the five nations were well known to the first people, and they were chased
5: out by the others - why, we don't know, probably because they were outside of the league to begin with - they may have come in there from somewhere else. But we don't know much except that one Pennsylvania archeologist has traced their route down the Susquehanna River, stopping in a variety of places until they finally settled in Washington Borough area, and there was established their main village, which was fortified. They claimed jurisdiction over all of the land, down on each side of the bay, about as far as present Annapolis or Kent Island. They didn't live in that area - they simply dominated it and kept other Indians from hunting there as much as they could. But in 1652 they made a treaty with the Maryland Colonists, and from that time on they were more or less friendly; that is, more than other Indians were to settlers.
Then other Indians who wandered through here were Algonquin
tribes of several sorts. They came from the present Cecil County area. One group of them came from the present location of downtown Philadelphia where they had a village, and they used to make raids down on Bush River on some of the first settlers there.
There were also displaced Algonquins from a variety of tribes from southern Maryland, and they came just in odd groups - a few here, a few there. They were leaving southern Maryland, both the eastern shore and western shore. They didn't quite know where they were going - they were just trying to stay out of contact as much as possible. They didn't like white people any more than they liked them, and many of them settled just beyond the edge of the colony. We know that from some of the information gathered by some of the ranger troops that there were many groups of them, sometimes just a family unit here or there, sometimes fifty or sixty at a time. And they came up being displaced persons. They stayed in this area until all the Indians moved on, and they were sometimes a menace to white people, sometimes not. Or you could turn it the other way around and say that the white people were a menace to the Indians. It just depends largely on your point of view, because they didn't get along very well.
The Indians of that period were still stone-age savages. Their chief delight was in making wars and raids on other Indians or white people. They would travel long distances to do it. Algonquins from the east made raids as far west as the Black Hills in the Dakotas. Iroquois from New York State made raids as far down in the summertime as the Gulf Coast. And so, you see, it was quite easy for the Iroquois from New York to make raids here in Maryland, and they did rather regularly. The only
5: thing that kept them back was the Susquehannock Indians along
the Susquehanna River who were squarely in their path, and who were aided by the Maryland Colonists in fighting the others.
Then, in addition to the Delawares who came in from one side - from the Pennsylvania side - the Philadelphia area and Cecil County, the displaced Algonquin tribes from southern Maryland, the Susquehannocks who were already here, there were the Iroquois who raided from New York State; all of whom were called Senecas by the early settlers - they didn't distinguish between the tribes at all. They called them all Senecas whether they were or not because they were all Algonquins, and to the early settlers all Indians looked alike. They consistently refused to make any distinction between them.
Then last of all, a group of Shawnees came in here; a group of about one hundred of them came in. We know that they came from the area of Illinois. They first wandered south in company with the Frenchmen - French trappers who just happened to travel with them. Then they started east. They came down the Potomac valley, then they turned north and finally came into the present Harford County area. And when they first showed up, one ranger or rather one militiaman with, I think, three men went out to investigate this group of eighty or ninety strange Indians. They were pretty "hearty" in those days. And he made a preliminary report. Then another one went out; he took five or six troopers with him, I think, the second time, and he made another report. They seemed to be friendly, and they stayed in this area for several years, and then moved over into Cecil County, across about from present-day Charleston. That area on early maps was called the Shawnee Shore, because of their settlement there. They stayed there for a time until all of the Indians were driven out, approximately around 1700.
Actually, it was a little later that they moved out, but that's a good date to hang things on. They and other Indians wandered out into Pennsylvania; some went north and others simply went west. The Shawnees showed up later on in the Indian wars in the Kentucky area, when that was a frontier.
The Indians had one special thing in this area which we no longer see, but which was very obvious to the first people who got here. The country was all wooded, from here down south,but right over this way, a few miles, beginning at the mouth of Broad Creek then running up the ridge between Broad Creek and Peddler's Run,then on a line just north of Dublin; and from there all the way across to
5: the Potomac River, there was a part or piece of land which was called the Barrens in those days. It was called the Barrens because when the first white people saw it, it had no timber on it; and it had no timber on it for the simple reason that the Indians burned it off every year. And they burned that enormous area - they didn't try to put the fire out - they just started it. The natural boundary where the formation of the land stopped the fires was somewhere in Pennsylvania north of the line, and about this line that I mentioned in our part of the county a district about twenty-two miles wide on the Susquehanna River, not quite that wide on the Potomac and varying in length, of course. If you fly over it, you notice that there is broken land wherever this area of Barrens was; it's rough land, it's not smooth. And just to the south of it, the land levels off a great deal. You can get the sight of that if you drive down the road from Scarborough to Ady. If you look on one side toward Pennsylvania, you will see broken land, rather rough. If you look in the other direction, you will see it beginning to level off; it's much smoother.
And the fires just happened to stop about on that ridge, and the Indians set them again every year. They set fire to the grass and whatever woods that happened to be there, and they kept it in a grassy area every year for the herds of buffalo which were here, then for elk which were bigger animals here, and deer; and it provided grazing for the big game animals of that sort. So that though they didn't keep stock, they at least fed some of the native stock that way, and so it made their hunting better. And the Indians were burning off that area as late as 1692 and by 1730, they had moved out of the Barrens entirely, and then it was safe for white people to move in.
The first white man to get anywhere near this area was Captain John Smith. He came up in the summer of 1807 on his trip up, the year Jamestown was founded. He only got about as far as Baltimore Harbor, The next year when he came up, he made it as far as the mouth of Deer Creek, and he left a record of his trip in his general history of Virginia in the Summarinals - quite a lengthy description of the country, of the Indians who he found and so forth. And he discovered the Susquehanna Indians. He discovered some Algonquin tribes a little further down on the Eastern Shore; and he came across the Senecas, who were down here making raids from New York State. He was the first white man in and he came with a number of companions in a barge which they rode up from Jamestown.
5: The second white man to come in came from the opposite direction. He was one of Champlain's voyagers, a man named Etienne Brule, who was one of Champlain's voyagers, and he sent him down one winter to try to recruit the Susquehannocks to fight the
Iroquois from this side while he had other Indians working on them on the Canadian side. Only the man didn't succeed in getting them to do anything. As a matter of fact, he himself didn't do the job any too well because he didn't report back to Champlain for three or four years, and when he did, he didn't give a very accurate report, apparently. So that some historians have doubted that he ever got here, but I think it's likely that he did, because we know that from his account that he must have spent the winter with the Susquehannocks.
It was half a day's canoe trip from their village, their fortifying village up where Wrightsville now is, down to the mouth of the Susquehanna, so that they could come down in a canoe in half a day; so I'm sure that if he came all the way down there from Canada, he went down until he struck salt water; he called it "till he got to the sea." So he was the next one, all by himself.
Then the traders were coming up. Virginia traders, first of all, came up to the mouth of the bay. All European people who settled anywhere on the east coast were anxious to get furs. They had a great market for them in Europe and they were very anxious to get them, and all of the Indians were very anxious to sell the furs. In fact, some historians or archeologists rather think that the reason the . . . (end of tape inaudible)
TAPE 25A - SIDE II
5: There is a story which I'm sure you've heard often, which happens to be completely untrue. I hesitate to mention it because numbers of local historians have written about it, and they've followed mostly what Preston wrote in his history of Hayford County
about the well-known story of the so-called university on Palmer's
Island. The more people have told that story, the more they've embellished it and given added details here and there.
The truth is that there was an English scholar named Edward Palmer, who was a wealthy Oxford man, who was a director of the Virginia colony, who did have a grant - a Virginia grant to the land at the head of the Chesapeake Bay which Virginia claimed at that time, of course. He got the grant in 1622; he died in 1624, before he ever did anything about it, and the people who report
S: that he started a university on Palmer's Island say that he got there in 1625, the year after he died. But that's the story, so accept it as a nice, fanciful story; and the more recent repetitions of it you hear, the more you see detail. But the truth of it is, he never got there, nor did anybody else ever sent by him get there; and after he died it was inherited by some . . . the grant was inherited by some
relative until, finally, a little bit later, it wasn't any good because it was in Maryland territory.
Traders came at various times and from various parts of
Virginia. And one Virginia trader, Captain Claiborne -
William Claiborne - came up and surveyed the upper part of the bay in 1627. In 1628, he established a trading post on Palmer's Island (now called Watson's Island) at the mouth of the Susquehanna, and he maintained that trading post for a number of years. It was a choice position, because all the Northern Indians could get there. The Susquehannocks got there regularly, and they couldn't keep the Iroquois out, so that the Iroquoian furs got down there as well as the Susquehannock furs, and it made a good market; that is, it was good until the Maryland Colony which was started in 1634 didn't like the idea of having the Virginia trader right across the head of the bay. So in a few years' time, they threw Claiborne out off of his claim at Kent Island and out of his outpost here at the head of the bay.
The outpost here was finally eliminated by the Sergeant of the Maryland Militia and a handful of men who came up and closed it out. Since this was an official military operation, it was all recorded in triplicate and got into the records in great detail, so that we know exactly what they found when they captured the island. So we know, for example, that they ate some of the hogs that were there and some of the rest they turned loose, which was the beginning of wild hogs in this part of the country. And as you may not know, horses and cattle and hogs multiplied faster than settlers, quite a bit faster, so that once the Maryland settlement got started going inland, cattle, horses, hogs went ahead of them. So that when settlement was made up here, they already found wild hogs; they already found wild horses; and there were already wild cattle. They ... inciden¬tally, in Maryland they used brands in those days just like they did in the west at a later time; and just as they did in Wyoming at a later period, they registered their brands at the county courthouse. You find rather complete records in some counties - very few records of brands here in Maryland, but I've found some ... I mean, Harford County or what was then this part of Baltimore County.
S: As you know, Baltimore County being on the front here, got divided up. By 1674, the eastern part of it was cut off and made into Cecil County; that took off everything on the other side of the bay on the Susquehanna River, and Baltimore County extended only from the Susquehanna River around about to Gibson Island on this side of the bay. Nobody knew how far back it went, nobody knew how far north; because by 1700 or soon after 1700, the Pennsylvania Colony was claiming that the border was in one place, and the Maryland Colonists claimed another. What actually happened was that the Pennsylvania settlers crowded south of the border in Cecil County so that the Nottingham Lots over here, that you probably know, were originally settled by Pennsylvanians, while Baltimore Countians went north on this side of the river; and by 1730 Baltimore County extended about up to that Indian fort or beyond on this side of the Susquehanna, and that was part of Baltimore County.
The first road that came down through here was built soon after settlement of this area by a man who ran a ferry up there - one of the early Cresaps who got into the news - the ancestor of the later Cresaps of the frontier wars. He laid out a road from his location to Rock Run down at Lapidum, and it went right approxi¬mately where this building is, right down along through the present village of Darlington, apparently, because we know that it went by Rigbie's house, and it went from there down to Rock Run. Your guess is as good as anybody's as to exactly where it went in that area, but it went there earlier.
You wonder about the fights between the settlers and the Indians
in this area. They were never very serious. There were ... no great number of people were ever involved, but just a few
usually just a handful of people. The first settlers got to the head of the bay in 1658, and probably a dozen or fifteen men moved in about that year. At a later time . . . I'd like to talk about the beginning of the plantation, because when they settled up here, the matter of settlement was exactly the same as it was at the mouth of the river; so we'll try to touch on it then. But settlers did come in by 1658. And by 1700 they hadn't yet reached as far north as the present #1 route across the county - not that far up. Kingsville was the ... the area of Kingsville was still having Indian raids in 1692, I think, or 1698. The early settlers didn't get beyond Deer Creek until after 1700. Remember that the Indians, though they might have gotten along well with the settlers, were very primitive stone-age savages, and it was pretty hard for seventeenth-century settlers to get along with them; and just as, I imagine, they thought the seventeenth-century settlers
5: were pretty hard to get along with. Anyway, they didn't like each other very much; and the friction was never very great, but it was more or less constant, and the settlers, most of them, knew nothing about the Indians; they just lumped them all together and looked on them as savages and had as little to do with them as possible.
And they were stone-age savages. The archeologists, for
example, have found up here in Wrightsville that within the time when white people knew of the Susquehanna fort up there, there were cannibals. They know that because they found green, broken and boiled out human bones in their rubbish heaps, and the only way you find that is if somebody was eating. That's the sort of neighbors they had; so you can understand why they were a little squeamish about watching them rather closely.
But the Susquehannocks had made a treaty with the settlers and more or less lived up to it. They tried, and the settlers expected them to; so that when the first settlers moved in along the bay front and along Bush River and Gunpowder River, the first question they asked an Indian when they saw him was to try to find out what sort of Indian he was, because they couldn't tell by his appearance - they didn't know the difference between different tribes.
But we have one record that said that when a group of Indians they happened to be Passogonic Indians who were Algonquins who lived in what is now downtown Philadelphia and who came up in canoes ... they had been up Gunpowder River - they had gotten in trouble with several settlers there - then they next appeared on Bush River at the house of Thomas Sampson and another man, two settlers who lived there together, and they saw these Indians coming and they went out to meet them in their boats, which was a peculiar thing ... we wouldn't expect them to do it now - you'd expect to meet them on land to fight. No, they didn't; they were afraid of being cut off in the woods by the Indians, and they always took to their boats first of all when there was a threat of Indians.
So they went out in their boats. Some of the settlers stayed ashore, and then they started to talk to these Indians, and they arrested them. According to the records, they said, "Be ye Susquehannocks, answer yea or no (laughter)." Well, I don't know what they answered. I suppose the settlers didn't either, because about that time, some of the Indians had gotten out of the boat and had gone up to the settlers' cabin. And the dog that belonged to one of the settlers jumped one of the Indians and bit him, and the Indian was startled and shot at the dog and when he started to
S: fire his gun, everybody started to fire them, and the end result was that one settler and five Indians got killed, for no good reason at all. The Indians were just on their way out; they'd been where they wanted to go. But it's just a little illustration of what happened. That was one of the first conflicts.
Soon after that on another occasion ... all of these are
reported in the Maryland Archives - we have the accounts in considerable detail, some of these things . .. On one occasion here right in the area, not too far from the present Havre de Grace, the Maryland authorities captured a Seneca Indian, to the great delight of the Susquehannocks who wanted to burn him alive. They thought that would be good fun! The Indians of that day had one way of spending the summer ... the women and the children and the old men stayed in the village and grew a crop for the next year and took care of things generally while the men all went on a spree - they went sometimes thousands of miles, as far as they could walk and get back home by winter, and they spent the time murdering and raping - that was their summer sport. Sometimes they took captives. They took women and children cap¬tive, very rarely a man, but often women and children. And they did that whether the captives were either white or Indian, and the reason for it was to keep their tribe numbers up in the tribes, because with all of this warfare and fighting, the tribes didn't grow very fast, and they adopted people into them, and they apparently had no hesitation in taking any kind of an Indian or even white people if they would live with them, and making Indians out of them.
On another occasion, there were two brothers living about where Joppa is now, who were startled one day. The man was out
"beating corn" according to the story; that is, he was making, beating up corn into meal, in a great big piece of log which had been hollowed out, with a pestle which was quite heavy. He was out doing that when a couple of Indians surprised him. They attacked him, so the man's wife promptly rushed out of the
house, grabbed up the pestle and knocked the Indian on the head with it and knocked him out (laughter). That stopped the fight. So she fixed him up and bound up his head, and everybody thought it was all over until the next day, he came back with some friends and they started the attack all over again. She came out again to the rescue and they hit her with a tomahawk that time and killed her or, at the last report, she was dying.
5: Now those Indians were wanderers who had come from southern Maryland; had simply wandered north. There was a group of fifty or sixty of them living somewhere on what is now the other side of Baltimore temporarily, and this one household of them was living on Back River where this Enoch family lived that they attacked. There was a peculiar military outcome of this. Both a captain and a colonel in the militia investigated this incident, and, apparently, they didn't get along too well, because they had a difference of opinion as to whose jurisdiction was involved. The captain claimed that he had a right to take his troop out because these people were in danger and the colonel said no, he shouldn't take them out unless he got a direct order from him to take them. So they got into such an argument about it that it finally got down to the authorities down at St. Mary's City and told them they better resolve their quarrel because if they couldn't get along with each other they probably couldn't get along with other people either, which quieted them down. But they were reported and, this is of special interest to us, this incident happened on Middle River, and the Indians left there and they were reported by other Indians who had gone to the mouth of Deer Creek to wait until the bark would peel so that they might build canoes to go and join the northern Indians. That's rather odd, because the southern Indians mostly used dug-out canoes but, in this incidence, they evidently knew how to make bark canoes, and they could make them out of some of the bark which was there. They didn't have any canoe birch, but they could make some bark canoes, and they evidently made them, because that's the last we heard of them.
There were many such small incidents. The people that had the hardest time were a few Quakers on the edge of things who
wouldn't fight, and the Indians soon found that out and annoyed them, simply by walking through their houses and taking their firearms off the wall and examining them and things of that sort just made a general nuisance of themselves; threw their weight around, and knowing that the Quakers wouldn't do anything about it.
Now Maryland at that time had no standing Army. It did have a militia. The militia was formed on a county basis, and each
county - the government officials of St. Mary's, the governor
and the council - chose the colonel of the militia and the
officers. They were chosen in that way and by appointment; and they in turn recruited the rest of the company, and they served on a per diem basis whenever they were called out. It was just a way of making a little extra money when they were called into active service - much like the National Guard thing that's been many years since .. you know, you get a few days' extra pay in
S
5: going to camp in the summertime for a couple of weeks and some¬thing of that sort.
But there were always some, of course, who wanted to do this a little longer, not just for two weeks, and they were often formed into ranger troops; and there are lots of reports of rangers in this area of ours long before any settlement got north of here. First of all, when the Susquehannock Indians needed some help in fighting the Iroquois, the Maryland authorities sent them a cannon, some powder,some shot from Spesutia Island, and they carted it over land up to the Susque-hannock Fort. They had to go over this area, of course, to do that.
There were surveyors over this area by 1683, though nobody lived here yet. Not much of the land as far as Broad Creek or near the edge of the Barrens, rather, was surveyed by 1700.
Then there were various sorts of militiamen who patrolled the edge of civilization. They were called out at various times; there are half a dozen different reports of them - who the commanders were and where they went, etc.
Then, toward the end of the century, a more regular ranger group was appointed on the northern edge of the colony. Their head¬quarters were in the fort which still exists in suburban
Baltimore, a long, low stone building, still there; that was their main fort. And there was a ranger trail from that fort to the next fort that the Virginia rangers had at about the Falls of the Potomac, and the Maryland rangers had a post on this side of the Falls.
And the Maryland rangers opened up a trail, blazed a trail - horsepath - from their fort over to the Potomac and they kept patrolling that rather regularly. And they laid out another trail from that fort to the Susquehanna; and we know a little bit about that because people like Willie Marye have run down the details of exactly where the lines went. We do know that that ranger trail was laid out soon after 1692, that it was patrolled pretty regularly by rangers and Indians - again, refugees from southern Maryland who were hired to help them, who patrolled with them and who lived in cabins along the route, etc. - and their object was to keep northern Indians out. There was a great fear then of ... that northern Indians, especial¬ly the Iroquois from New York under French leadership, were going to attack the colonists here in Maryland. They didn't, as you know, for about another fifty years until the time of the French and Indian wars, and the frontier was no longer here; the frontier was then up around Fort Frederick, quite a bit further west, and
5: about fifty years later. Finally, since there seemed to be no more need for these rangers, they were disbanded in 1692. There is one record that was left . . . 1698 - I beg your pardon - 1698 that the rangers were finally disbanded on this northern edge. They laid out the first roads. They had a cabin somewhere not too far from where Dublin is - nobody knows exactly, but was somewhere about there - they not only kept their trail open from there to the Garrison Fort and from there to the river, but they kept several trails open from places along their ranger trail down to civilization. It was sixteen miles from this outermost post somewhere around Dublin to the nearest settlers down near Bush River. When they laid it out, it was sixteen miles down to the nearest settler. But that, again, is the beginning of some of the roads; people began to travel those routes.
When the settlers came, they came after 1700, and that's what we'll begin with next time.
Our time is up. If any of you have questions, I'll be very glad to try to answer them.
F: This has been talk one of a four-part series - January 7, 1975.
The next talk will be next Tuesday night, January 14, 1975.

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Transcript

[abridged]
INTRODUCTION TO TAPE - Roenna Fahrney, Harford County Library
This is the first of a series of talks on the history of Darlington to be given by the Reverend Scriven in Darlington, January 1975.
INTRODUCTION TO REVEREND SCRIVEN
your attention first . . . the Recreation Council, we welcome you to this series of programs on the history of Darlington.
Reverend Mr. George B. Scriven was for many years the pastor of Nativity Episcopal Church, retiring from that post in 1972. He became a resident of Darlington in 1940 when he married Miss Isabel Wilson, and has maintained a summer home here ever since.
Until recently he was an editor of religious textbooks, but in recent years has concentrated on the history of Maryland and the local history of the Darlington community. Articles which he has written have appeared in the Baltimore Sun, the Maryland Historical Magazine, and Church Historical Magazine, and the Johns Hopkins Journal of the History of Medicine. This month he has an article appearing in the Old Mill News on the first mills in Maryland.
In making the introduction, I should remind you that on the twenty-first of January, this room will not be available to us because of the regular meeting of the PTA of the school and that session will be moved and held in the parish house of the Grace Episcopal Church.
I present to you the Reverend Mr. George B. Scriven.
5: The first thing I have to do is thank the Community Council for giving me the opportunity to do something that I would really like to do anyway. So they just had to give me a chance, and I'm here.
I'm very much interested in the local history of this area, and about twenty-five years ago started gathering information on the settlement of the original Baltimore County. That, as you know,
5: was the area on both sides of the bay. On the eastern shore, the county line went from Toichester into Chestertown. On this side of the bay, the county line was Mountain Road going down to Gibson Island. And apart from those two boundaries, nobody knew where any other boundaries of the county were. They were lost somewhere in what's now Delaware or Pennsylvania or
Western Maryland. Nobody knew where it was.
When people made estimates of the Indians of Maryland in the seventeenth century, much the same thing happened. Nobody knew how much country Maryland covered and nobody had been to all the Indian places anyway, so it's rather hard to tell. One man's guess was about as good as another.
In talking about this, I would like to start with a rather broad area and finally get down to the very narrow one of the village of Darlington itself.
So, beginning far enough back, we discover that there were Indians here as they were everywhere else in the United States and South America, also, and Canada, a great many years ago. It has only been since carbon dating has been possible that people have begun to get even approximate dates for such things. And it is estimated that Indians came to this country - that is, the United States, to Canada and to South America - at least as early as the Wisconsin Glacial Period about thirty-five thousand years ago - thirty-five or forty thousand - five thousand years isn't important when you get that far back. And they came somewhere from the outer part of Siberia. They crossed the ice into what is now Alaska and worked their way down the valleys of the coastal area and finally went all over this country and all over South America.
Now, it's very difficult - if you'll let me get away from the mike for just a minute - to appreciate time. If you let the distance of that board cover the whole thirty-five thousand years that there were probably Indians around in this area as well as others, this little bit - from here over - begins to cover what we have a little information on.
From about here over to about twelve thousand B.C., we know that there were Indians in this country, though there's a little bit of information on them, not much. They were at that time wanderers who were not even hunters - they were just gatherers of food.
They probably bedded down at night much the same way that most wild animals do, finding as warm a place as possible. They had no
5: tools of any sort; the closest they could get to it was to pick up pieces of stone that approximated the tools that later Indians made out of stone. But beginning about here - about twelve thousand B.C. and running from there to about eight thousand I mean, twelve thousand years ago to eight thousand years ago you go back that far, there was a type of spear point found which has been found all over the northern part of the United States - over much of the southern, also, and, I think, down in Central America - I don't know how much beyond that, but certainly over all the area of the United States and up into what is much of Alaska.
It was a kind of point which you've probably never seen. There is one pictured there in the most recent issue of the Smithsonian Magazine. It was what was called a fluted point. Now they were about the size of this - this isn't one of them. And on each side, there was a groove, a very noticeable groove, right down the middle of each side of it. If you ever come across one, you'll be able to recognize it by that. And people began to distinguish them between World War I and World War II. I don't remember the exact time, but the occasion is interesting . . . a colored cowhand was riding into Folsom, New Mexico and going down a dry gulch, he came across a place where the bank had slipped down, and he saw something sticking out of the debris. He went over and took some samples out of it, found there were some peculiar-looking spear points among them. So he put them in his pocket. When he got into the local saloon that evening, he was showing them around, and one man saw them and thought "Here is something of great importance." So he called a friend of his who was an archeologist in Indian affairs. He came out and he began to work on them, and since that time, they have been called fluted points.
There are several varieties of them. They have been found on in-
surface finds in Harford County, but never in any diggings that I know of.
I speak with much hesitation on this whole subject of Indian things because the information is changing very rapidly. In any kind of archeology, a ten-year-old textbook is out of date, and in this one, I suppose a five-year-old textbook is pretty much out of date. And if you're interested in following it, you ought to join the local society, archeological society, which I think has its headquarters in Bel Air. I see one of the members in front of me, and if anybody is interested, I'm sure he would be glad to tell you about it after the meeting. Because if you want to follow the Indian affairs, that's the way to do it.
5: But those fluted points have been found in in-surface finds right here in Maryland. So many of them have been found in Pennsylvania that one Pennsylvania archeologist claimed that they started there. But the others didn't follow his lead - they think he was not accurate.
But we know almost nothing about the Indians of that period, except that they used that kind of a spear point. And just within the last year, some archeologist found out how, exactly in detail, they were fastened onto the spear., and there's an article about it in the most recent Smithsonian Magazine. So if you find a relic of that period, it will be one of those fluted points; probably will be of fairly good size; and there is a chance of finding them right in your own back yard.
The next period is one in which Indians begin to shape some stones a little bit to make them more nearly what they wanted. This rather crude-looking object here is one of them. This is a piece of soapstone. This was a part of a soapstone bowl which was broken in the process of manufacturing. You can see it was rounded - the bottom was shaped - it was rounded here. And when the maker was trying to dig a sort of a hole in it here, he split off half of it, probably much to his disgust, and he threw it down, and it's been found since. You can find many of those around these parts - many of them were made on that soapstone ridge near Scarborough - and the remains of a great many of them, incomplete remains, most of them. But that is a relic of the next period.
Then there was after that the period, which for want of a better name, they called transitional in this area - simply who were moving from one part of a culture to another. And again, about the only thing we know about it very definitely is that Indians at that point started to make some pottery - they started to. And having made soapstone bowls, they made a pottery bowl that was shaped something like it, a very crude sort of an affair. And those are characteristics of that period.
The periods about which we know most were called the Eastern Woodlands - three periods within that area. If all of this represents one of those, this little stripe over here represents about that last part. And we know more about those because they were the latest Indians in these parts or anywhere else. We know about them through archeology. The sights can now be located and can be dated fairly accurately, and there still remains a great deal to be done.
Beginning with that first woodland period, there was a beginning of some making of pottery. The Indians then came to be a little
5: more ... by that time, about 200 B.C. ... they came to be a little more like the Indians that were here when the first white people came into the area. They were beginning, by that time, to be gatherers of food . . . not only gatherers, but to cultivate a little bit of food - not much, but a little. And they began to cultivate gardens. They had corn and beans and squash, all of which were varieties that came from Mexico by way of more civilized Indians. And about that time they began to develop a bow and arrow for use; it was much more useful than a spear. And from then on we get more accurate information and more of it in the various digs that are made.
By the middle woodland period, bows and arrows were well used; that is, the early Christian centuries would be covered by that. Of course, they had no contact with any civilized part of the world, so all we know of them is through archeological remains. Finally, in the last of the Eastern Woodland cultures, the
Indians looked very much like they did when the white men got here; that is, all those in the east lived in towns - they lived in collections of houses which made up a town or village. Some¬times they were fortified by having poles placed on ends around them, making a kind of a fort. They grew gardens. By the last of that woodland period, they made canoes, both dugout and bark canoes. By the last part of that Eastern Woodland period, they were growing not only gardens, but almost fields of produce; and they weren't depending as much then as they were in the past simply on getting game for food. That's long enough to spend the few minutes we have on a group of people that really didn't leave us much except some remains that can be dug up; and if you are interested in it, you can find a lot of information available. And the best way to keep up with it is to join a local archeologi¬cal society. It helps the society to do some work and it gives you other people to work with if you want to follow up with that particular field. And there's still an enormous amount to be done.
When the white settlers got here, they found the Indians all up and down the coast and they were, in this area, of several different sorts. The Indians who dominated this area when the first white people came to the head of the bay and before that - they were there one hundred years before that - lived where Washington Borough, Pennsylvania now is; that was their main town. There was a smaller village just across the river between the mouth of Octoraro Creek and the dam, and that village lasted there until about the 16901s. It's easy to see why many settlers didn't move into this area until later, because those were a type of Iroquoian Indians. They had moved down about one hundred years before from the Iroquoian area in central New York, where the five nations were well known to the first people, and they were chased
5: out by the others - why, we don't know, probably because they were outside of the league to begin with - they may have come in there from somewhere else. But we don't know much except that one Pennsylvania archeologist has traced their route down the Susquehanna River, stopping in a variety of places until they finally settled in Washington Borough area, and there was established their main village, which was fortified. They claimed jurisdiction over all of the land, down on each side of the bay, about as far as present Annapolis or Kent Island. They didn't live in that area - they simply dominated it and kept other Indians from hunting there as much as they could. But in 1652 they made a treaty with the Maryland Colonists, and from that time on they were more or less friendly; that is, more than other Indians were to settlers.
Then other Indians who wandered through here were Algonquin
tribes of several sorts. They came from the present Cecil County area. One group of them came from the present location of downtown Philadelphia where they had a village, and they used to make raids down on Bush River on some of the first settlers there.
There were also displaced Algonquins from a variety of tribes from southern Maryland, and they came just in odd groups - a few here, a few there. They were leaving southern Maryland, both the eastern shore and western shore. They didn't quite know where they were going - they were just trying to stay out of contact as much as possible. They didn't like white people any more than they liked them, and many of them settled just beyond the edge of the colony. We know that from some of the information gathered by some of the ranger troops that there were many groups of them, sometimes just a family unit here or there, sometimes fifty or sixty at a time. And they came up being displaced persons. They stayed in this area until all the Indians moved on, and they were sometimes a menace to white people, sometimes not. Or you could turn it the other way around and say that the white people were a menace to the Indians. It just depends largely on your point of view, because they didn't get along very well.
The Indians of that period were still stone-age savages. Their chief delight was in making wars and raids on other Indians or white people. They would travel long distances to do it. Algonquins from the east made raids as far west as the Black Hills in the Dakotas. Iroquois from New York State made raids as far down in the summertime as the Gulf Coast. And so, you see, it was quite easy for the Iroquois from New York to make raids here in Maryland, and they did rather regularly. The only
5: thing that kept them back was the Susquehannock Indians along
the Susquehanna River who were squarely in their path, and who were aided by the Maryland Colonists in fighting the others.
Then, in addition to the Delawares who came in from one side - from the Pennsylvania side - the Philadelphia area and Cecil County, the displaced Algonquin tribes from southern Maryland, the Susquehannocks who were already here, there were the Iroquois who raided from New York State; all of whom were called Senecas by the early settlers - they didn't distinguish between the tribes at all. They called them all Senecas whether they were or not because they were all Algonquins, and to the early settlers all Indians looked alike. They consistently refused to make any distinction between them.
Then last of all, a group of Shawnees came in here; a group of about one hundred of them came in. We know that they came from the area of Illinois. They first wandered south in company with the Frenchmen - French trappers who just happened to travel with them. Then they started east. They came down the Potomac valley, then they turned north and finally came into the present Harford County area. And when they first showed up, one ranger or rather one militiaman with, I think, three men went out to investigate this group of eighty or ninety strange Indians. They were pretty "hearty" in those days. And he made a preliminary report. Then another one went out; he took five or six troopers with him, I think, the second time, and he made another report. They seemed to be friendly, and they stayed in this area for several years, and then moved over into Cecil County, across about from present-day Charleston. That area on early maps was called the Shawnee Shore, because of their settlement there. They stayed there for a time until all of the Indians were driven out, approximately around 1700.
Actually, it was a little later that they moved out, but that's a good date to hang things on. They and other Indians wandered out into Pennsylvania; some went north and others simply went west. The Shawnees showed up later on in the Indian wars in the Kentucky area, when that was a frontier.
The Indians had one special thing in this area which we no longer see, but which was very obvious to the first people who got here. The country was all wooded, from here down south,but right over this way, a few miles, beginning at the mouth of Broad Creek then running up the ridge between Broad Creek and Peddler's Run,then on a line just north of Dublin; and from there all the way across to
5: the Potomac River, there was a part or piece of land which was called the Barrens in those days. It was called the Barrens because when the first white people saw it, it had no timber on it; and it had no timber on it for the simple reason that the Indians burned it off every year. And they burned that enormous area - they didn't try to put the fire out - they just started it. The natural boundary where the formation of the land stopped the fires was somewhere in Pennsylvania north of the line, and about this line that I mentioned in our part of the county a district about twenty-two miles wide on the Susquehanna River, not quite that wide on the Potomac and varying in length, of course. If you fly over it, you notice that there is broken land wherever this area of Barrens was; it's rough land, it's not smooth. And just to the south of it, the land levels off a great deal. You can get the sight of that if you drive down the road from Scarborough to Ady. If you look on one side toward Pennsylvania, you will see broken land, rather rough. If you look in the other direction, you will see it beginning to level off; it's much smoother.
And the fires just happened to stop about on that ridge, and the Indians set them again every year. They set fire to the grass and whatever woods that happened to be there, and they kept it in a grassy area every year for the herds of buffalo which were here, then for elk which were bigger animals here, and deer; and it provided grazing for the big game animals of that sort. So that though they didn't keep stock, they at least fed some of the native stock that way, and so it made their hunting better. And the Indians were burning off that area as late as 1692 and by 1730, they had moved out of the Barrens entirely, and then it was safe for white people to move in.
The first white man to get anywhere near this area was Captain John Smith. He came up in the summer of 1807 on his trip up, the year Jamestown was founded. He only got about as far as Baltimore Harbor, The next year when he came up, he made it as far as the mouth of Deer Creek, and he left a record of his trip in his general history of Virginia in the Summarinals - quite a lengthy description of the country, of the Indians who he found and so forth. And he discovered the Susquehanna Indians. He discovered some Algonquin tribes a little further down on the Eastern Shore; and he came across the Senecas, who were down here making raids from New York State. He was the first white man in and he came with a number of companions in a barge which they rode up from Jamestown.
5: The second white man to come in came from the opposite direction. He was one of Champlain's voyagers, a man named Etienne Brule, who was one of Champlain's voyagers, and he sent him down one winter to try to recruit the Susquehannocks to fight the
Iroquois from this side while he had other Indians working on them on the Canadian side. Only the man didn't succeed in getting them to do anything. As a matter of fact, he himself didn't do the job any too well because he didn't report back to Champlain for three or four years, and when he did, he didn't give a very accurate report, apparently. So that some historians have doubted that he ever got here, but I think it's likely that he did, because we know that from his account that he must have spent the winter with the Susquehannocks.
It was half a day's canoe trip from their village, their fortifying village up where Wrightsville now is, down to the mouth of the Susquehanna, so that they could come down in a canoe in half a day; so I'm sure that if he came all the way down there from Canada, he went down until he struck salt water; he called it "till he got to the sea." So he was the next one, all by himself.
Then the traders were coming up. Virginia traders, first of all, came up to the mouth of the bay. All European people who settled anywhere on the east coast were anxious to get furs. They had a great market for them in Europe and they were very anxious to get them, and all of the Indians were very anxious to sell the furs. In fact, some historians or archeologists rather think that the reason the . . . (end of tape inaudible)
TAPE 25A - SIDE II
5: There is a story which I'm sure you've heard often, which happens to be completely untrue. I hesitate to mention it because numbers of local historians have written about it, and they've followed mostly what Preston wrote in his history of Hayford County
about the well-known story of the so-called university on Palmer's
Island. The more people have told that story, the more they've embellished it and given added details here and there.
The truth is that there was an English scholar named Edward Palmer, who was a wealthy Oxford man, who was a director of the Virginia colony, who did have a grant - a Virginia grant to the land at the head of the Chesapeake Bay which Virginia claimed at that time, of course. He got the grant in 1622; he died in 1624, before he ever did anything about it, and the people who report
S: that he started a university on Palmer's Island say that he got there in 1625, the year after he died. But that's the story, so accept it as a nice, fanciful story; and the more recent repetitions of it you hear, the more you see detail. But the truth of it is, he never got there, nor did anybody else ever sent by him get there; and after he died it was inherited by some . . . the grant was inherited by some
relative until, finally, a little bit later, it wasn't any good because it was in Maryland territory.
Traders came at various times and from various parts of
Virginia. And one Virginia trader, Captain Claiborne -
William Claiborne - came up and surveyed the upper part of the bay in 1627. In 1628, he established a trading post on Palmer's Island (now called Watson's Island) at the mouth of the Susquehanna, and he maintained that trading post for a number of years. It was a choice position, because all the Northern Indians could get there. The Susquehannocks got there regularly, and they couldn't keep the Iroquois out, so that the Iroquoian furs got down there as well as the Susquehannock furs, and it made a good market; that is, it was good until the Maryland Colony which was started in 1634 didn't like the idea of having the Virginia trader right across the head of the bay. So in a few years' time, they threw Claiborne out off of his claim at Kent Island and out of his outpost here at the head of the bay.
The outpost here was finally eliminated by the Sergeant of the Maryland Militia and a handful of men who came up and closed it out. Since this was an official military operation, it was all recorded in triplicate and got into the records in great detail, so that we know exactly what they found when they captured the island. So we know, for example, that they ate some of the hogs that were there and some of the rest they turned loose, which was the beginning of wild hogs in this part of the country. And as you may not know, horses and cattle and hogs multiplied faster than settlers, quite a bit faster, so that once the Maryland settlement got started going inland, cattle, horses, hogs went ahead of them. So that when settlement was made up here, they already found wild hogs; they already found wild horses; and there were already wild cattle. They ... inciden¬tally, in Maryland they used brands in those days just like they did in the west at a later time; and just as they did in Wyoming at a later period, they registered their brands at the county courthouse. You find rather complete records in some counties - very few records of brands here in Maryland, but I've found some ... I mean, Harford County or what was then this part of Baltimore County.
S: As you know, Baltimore County being on the front here, got divided up. By 1674, the eastern part of it was cut off and made into Cecil County; that took off everything on the other side of the bay on the Susquehanna River, and Baltimore County extended only from the Susquehanna River around about to Gibson Island on this side of the bay. Nobody knew how far back it went, nobody knew how far north; because by 1700 or soon after 1700, the Pennsylvania Colony was claiming that the border was in one place, and the Maryland Colonists claimed another. What actually happened was that the Pennsylvania settlers crowded south of the border in Cecil County so that the Nottingham Lots over here, that you probably know, were originally settled by Pennsylvanians, while Baltimore Countians went north on this side of the river; and by 1730 Baltimore County extended about up to that Indian fort or beyond on this side of the Susquehanna, and that was part of Baltimore County.
The first road that came down through here was built soon after settlement of this area by a man who ran a ferry up there - one of the early Cresaps who got into the news - the ancestor of the later Cresaps of the frontier wars. He laid out a road from his location to Rock Run down at Lapidum, and it went right approxi¬mately where this building is, right down along through the present village of Darlington, apparently, because we know that it went by Rigbie's house, and it went from there down to Rock Run. Your guess is as good as anybody's as to exactly where it went in that area, but it went there earlier.
You wonder about the fights between the settlers and the Indians
in this area. They were never very serious. There were ... no great number of people were ever involved, but just a few
usually just a handful of people. The first settlers got to the head of the bay in 1658, and probably a dozen or fifteen men moved in about that year. At a later time . . . I'd like to talk about the beginning of the plantation, because when they settled up here, the matter of settlement was exactly the same as it was at the mouth of the river; so we'll try to touch on it then. But settlers did come in by 1658. And by 1700 they hadn't yet reached as far north as the present #1 route across the county - not that far up. Kingsville was the ... the area of Kingsville was still having Indian raids in 1692, I think, or 1698. The early settlers didn't get beyond Deer Creek until after 1700. Remember that the Indians, though they might have gotten along well with the settlers, were very primitive stone-age savages, and it was pretty hard for seventeenth-century settlers to get along with them; and just as, I imagine, they thought the seventeenth-century settlers
5: were pretty hard to get along with. Anyway, they didn't like each other very much; and the friction was never very great, but it was more or less constant, and the settlers, most of them, knew nothing about the Indians; they just lumped them all together and looked on them as savages and had as little to do with them as possible.
And they were stone-age savages. The archeologists, for
example, have found up here in Wrightsville that within the time when white people knew of the Susquehanna fort up there, there were cannibals. They know that because they found green, broken and boiled out human bones in their rubbish heaps, and the only way you find that is if somebody was eating. That's the sort of neighbors they had; so you can understand why they were a little squeamish about watching them rather closely.
But the Susquehannocks had made a treaty with the settlers and more or less lived up to it. They tried, and the settlers expected them to; so that when the first settlers moved in along the bay front and along Bush River and Gunpowder River, the first question they asked an Indian when they saw him was to try to find out what sort of Indian he was, because they couldn't tell by his appearance - they didn't know the difference between different tribes.
But we have one record that said that when a group of Indians they happened to be Passogonic Indians who were Algonquins who lived in what is now downtown Philadelphia and who came up in canoes ... they had been up Gunpowder River - they had gotten in trouble with several settlers there - then they next appeared on Bush River at the house of Thomas Sampson and another man, two settlers who lived there together, and they saw these Indians coming and they went out to meet them in their boats, which was a peculiar thing ... we wouldn't expect them to do it now - you'd expect to meet them on land to fight. No, they didn't; they were afraid of being cut off in the woods by the Indians, and they always took to their boats first of all when there was a threat of Indians.
So they went out in their boats. Some of the settlers stayed ashore, and then they started to talk to these Indians, and they arrested them. According to the records, they said, "Be ye Susquehannocks, answer yea or no (laughter)." Well, I don't know what they answered. I suppose the settlers didn't either, because about that time, some of the Indians had gotten out of the boat and had gone up to the settlers' cabin. And the dog that belonged to one of the settlers jumped one of the Indians and bit him, and the Indian was startled and shot at the dog and when he started to
S: fire his gun, everybody started to fire them, and the end result was that one settler and five Indians got killed, for no good reason at all. The Indians were just on their way out; they'd been where they wanted to go. But it's just a little illustration of what happened. That was one of the first conflicts.
Soon after that on another occasion ... all of these are
reported in the Maryland Archives - we have the accounts in considerable detail, some of these things . .. On one occasion here right in the area, not too far from the present Havre de Grace, the Maryland authorities captured a Seneca Indian, to the great delight of the Susquehannocks who wanted to burn him alive. They thought that would be good fun! The Indians of that day had one way of spending the summer ... the women and the children and the old men stayed in the village and grew a crop for the next year and took care of things generally while the men all went on a spree - they went sometimes thousands of miles, as far as they could walk and get back home by winter, and they spent the time murdering and raping - that was their summer sport. Sometimes they took captives. They took women and children cap¬tive, very rarely a man, but often women and children. And they did that whether the captives were either white or Indian, and the reason for it was to keep their tribe numbers up in the tribes, because with all of this warfare and fighting, the tribes didn't grow very fast, and they adopted people into them, and they apparently had no hesitation in taking any kind of an Indian or even white people if they would live with them, and making Indians out of them.
On another occasion, there were two brothers living about where Joppa is now, who were startled one day. The man was out
"beating corn" according to the story; that is, he was making, beating up corn into meal, in a great big piece of log which had been hollowed out, with a pestle which was quite heavy. He was out doing that when a couple of Indians surprised him. They attacked him, so the man's wife promptly rushed out of the
house, grabbed up the pestle and knocked the Indian on the head with it and knocked him out (laughter). That stopped the fight. So she fixed him up and bound up his head, and everybody thought it was all over until the next day, he came back with some friends and they started the attack all over again. She came out again to the rescue and they hit her with a tomahawk that time and killed her or, at the last report, she was dying.
5: Now those Indians were wanderers who had come from southern Maryland; had simply wandered north. There was a group of fifty or sixty of them living somewhere on what is now the other side of Baltimore temporarily, and this one household of them was living on Back River where this Enoch family lived that they attacked. There was a peculiar military outcome of this. Both a captain and a colonel in the militia investigated this incident, and, apparently, they didn't get along too well, because they had a difference of opinion as to whose jurisdiction was involved. The captain claimed that he had a right to take his troop out because these people were in danger and the colonel said no, he shouldn't take them out unless he got a direct order from him to take them. So they got into such an argument about it that it finally got down to the authorities down at St. Mary's City and told them they better resolve their quarrel because if they couldn't get along with each other they probably couldn't get along with other people either, which quieted them down. But they were reported and, this is of special interest to us, this incident happened on Middle River, and the Indians left there and they were reported by other Indians who had gone to the mouth of Deer Creek to wait until the bark would peel so that they might build canoes to go and join the northern Indians. That's rather odd, because the southern Indians mostly used dug-out canoes but, in this incidence, they evidently knew how to make bark canoes, and they could make them out of some of the bark which was there. They didn't have any canoe birch, but they could make some bark canoes, and they evidently made them, because that's the last we heard of them.
There were many such small incidents. The people that had the hardest time were a few Quakers on the edge of things who
wouldn't fight, and the Indians soon found that out and annoyed them, simply by walking through their houses and taking their firearms off the wall and examining them and things of that sort just made a general nuisance of themselves; threw their weight around, and knowing that the Quakers wouldn't do anything about it.
Now Maryland at that time had no standing Army. It did have a militia. The militia was formed on a county basis, and each
county - the government officials of St. Mary's, the governor
and the council - chose the colonel of the militia and the
officers. They were chosen in that way and by appointment; and they in turn recruited the rest of the company, and they served on a per diem basis whenever they were called out. It was just a way of making a little extra money when they were called into active service - much like the National Guard thing that's been many years since .. you know, you get a few days' extra pay in
S
5: going to camp in the summertime for a couple of weeks and some¬thing of that sort.
But there were always some, of course, who wanted to do this a little longer, not just for two weeks, and they were often formed into ranger troops; and there are lots of reports of rangers in this area of ours long before any settlement got north of here. First of all, when the Susquehannock Indians needed some help in fighting the Iroquois, the Maryland authorities sent them a cannon, some powder,some shot from Spesutia Island, and they carted it over land up to the Susque-hannock Fort. They had to go over this area, of course, to do that.
There were surveyors over this area by 1683, though nobody lived here yet. Not much of the land as far as Broad Creek or near the edge of the Barrens, rather, was surveyed by 1700.
Then there were various sorts of militiamen who patrolled the edge of civilization. They were called out at various times; there are half a dozen different reports of them - who the commanders were and where they went, etc.
Then, toward the end of the century, a more regular ranger group was appointed on the northern edge of the colony. Their head¬quarters were in the fort which still exists in suburban
Baltimore, a long, low stone building, still there; that was their main fort. And there was a ranger trail from that fort to the next fort that the Virginia rangers had at about the Falls of the Potomac, and the Maryland rangers had a post on this side of the Falls.
And the Maryland rangers opened up a trail, blazed a trail - horsepath - from their fort over to the Potomac and they kept patrolling that rather regularly. And they laid out another trail from that fort to the Susquehanna; and we know a little bit about that because people like Willie Marye have run down the details of exactly where the lines went. We do know that that ranger trail was laid out soon after 1692, that it was patrolled pretty regularly by rangers and Indians - again, refugees from southern Maryland who were hired to help them, who patrolled with them and who lived in cabins along the route, etc. - and their object was to keep northern Indians out. There was a great fear then of ... that northern Indians, especial¬ly the Iroquois from New York under French leadership, were going to attack the colonists here in Maryland. They didn't, as you know, for about another fifty years until the time of the French and Indian wars, and the frontier was no longer here; the frontier was then up around Fort Frederick, quite a bit further west, and
5: about fifty years later. Finally, since there seemed to be no more need for these rangers, they were disbanded in 1692. There is one record that was left . . . 1698 - I beg your pardon - 1698 that the rangers were finally disbanded on this northern edge. They laid out the first roads. They had a cabin somewhere not too far from where Dublin is - nobody knows exactly, but was somewhere about there - they not only kept their trail open from there to the Garrison Fort and from there to the river, but they kept several trails open from places along their ranger trail down to civilization. It was sixteen miles from this outermost post somewhere around Dublin to the nearest settlers down near Bush River. When they laid it out, it was sixteen miles down to the nearest settler. But that, again, is the beginning of some of the roads; people began to travel those routes.
When the settlers came, they came after 1700, and that's what we'll begin with next time.
Our time is up. If any of you have questions, I'll be very glad to try to answer them.
F: This has been talk one of a four-part series - January 7, 1975.
The next talk will be next Tuesday night, January 14, 1975.